I made something good today. This phrase doesn't come often, considering what a disaster I am in the kitchen. I have been an enemy of proper cooking for years, and this sort of clumsiness is so inborn it's hard to let go. Nevertheless, let me say it again. I made something good today.
I had no set of recipe I'm following, only an inkling of what I wanted to include in the dish; and because of this principle, my cooking has largely been a major embarrassment and the brunt of family joke. I had bought ten fat tiger prawns today in the market; they looked fresh, big, and firm, not to mention rather cheap (SGD18/ kg) compared to what I would've paid at the supermarket and I was salivating of the thought of their juicy flesh.
When dinner time rolled by, I dragged myself to the kitchen and prepared to make do with anything I had in the fridge. This is my second falling. Since I never planned the dish, I resorted to 'making do' a lot. No garlic? Okay, we'll do without it although the dish is supposedly called "Garlic Chicken". No fish? Fine. No biggie, we'll just substitute it with fish balls.
That's how bad I am at cooking. I replace X with Z because a better replacement Y is rotting somewhere inside the fridge. And have I told you I abhor recipes? They're just there to hamper my creativity.
But one thing I do possess -- an appetite fostered by years and years of excellent home cooking (courtesy of Mum, Grandmum, and a long line of live-in servants). That the product of their effort turns out to be me, (the only student delegated to dish-washing in a secondary school cooking class) is no fault of theirs. I claim full responsibility.
Okay, the list of ingredients of which I made do with:
10 tiger prawns (fresh, big ones)
2 tbsp of butter or more (real one, spoil yourself)
1/2 of an onion, finely diced
1/2 cup of water, give or take
1 1/2 tbsp of Worcestershire sauce (I use a Japanese brand called "Bull Dog")
1 tsp salt
sugar to taste
To begin:
1. De-shell the prawns, keeping the head and the shell for later use. Do not throw them out. There's a lot of goodness in them.
2. De-vein the prawns, should you wish.
3. Wash the shells, heads, and prawns. Drain excess water.
4. Heat up the pan and melt the butter until it slightly browns and the buttery smell rises up in the air
5. Put in your finely diced onion and sautee till they're limp and pliant
6. Throw in the heads and the shells, along with a quarter half of a cup of water
7. Let them all simmer. The shells and the prawn heads will start oozing red juice and the unmistakable seafood flavor. This is why we keep them, to get maximum flava'!
8. When there's only half of the water left in the pan, remove the shells. Then throw some more water and simmer it till, again, we're left with only half of the original water amount. By this time, your sauce should be pretty reddish. Remove the heads.
10. Put in your Worcestershire sauce, along with salt and sugar. Stir.
11. The prawns are next. Cook them for 1 minute on one side, turning them over on the other side afterward. Since they cook pretty fast, we want them to cook just right. I keep flipping them over until I see that they've turned white and bright pink in color, and when you poke them with the spatula, the flesh has a bouncy resistance to it.
12. Stir the prawns around until they're coated with the sauce and you're done!
Yay! There we go. I ate it with some leftover pasta, and I'm going to bring it to work tomorrow, along with some rice. It tasted really good, and I especially liked the sauce. It wasn't overly prawn-ish, despite my having squeezed the living juice out of those shells and heads, but so tasty and it balanced just right with the butter. Oh, the butter. I love butter. It gives another layer to the taste that you won't get if you substitute this magic dairy product with any other kind (olive oil, margarine? Yuck). The sauce was creamy but not overly so, and you just wanted to mop it out with bare fingers. I did.
It's not the usual Shrimp with Worcestershire sauce I'm used to, but heck, it's still good. I'm kind of proud of it, and I'll upload some pictures. They're not high quality photos, so stretch your imagination. :)
Bon Appetit!
salivating :D
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